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      in US Politics

      The media has mostly not taken the bait on dubious Biden claims – with some Australia-linked exceptions | Jason Wilson

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      The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More

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      in Elections

      Fox News's Tucker Carlson mocked for 'lost in the mail' Biden documents claim

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      The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been mocked for his attempt to explain why he could not produce some documents he had promised relating to Joe Biden.He said the only copy of the papers, which he claimed added to claims about Biden’s son Hunter, had been lost.In a segment delivered to camera, Carlson said:
      On Monday we received from a source a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family. We believe those documents are authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning … We texted a producer in New York and we asked him to send those documents to us in LA … He shipped those documents overnight to California with a large national carrier brand … But the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared.
      He went on to say of the delivery company, which he did not name:
      They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it, they went through the office in New York where our producer dropped that package off, they combed their entire cavernous sorting facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look for. They went far and beyond. But they found nothing, those documents have vanished. As of tonight the company has no idea – and no working theory even – about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign.
      Carlson’s show has been one of the main conduits of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, attempting to expand the narrative about his dealings in Ukraine and China and castigating other media outlets for not paying enough attention to claims made recently in the New York Post.Carson’s story of the lost documents cut little ice on social media:BREAKING: Documents Tucker Carlson never actually had that would allegedly blow up the election were so important that they were sent via DHL, and now can’t be found despite copiers, iPhone cameras and security cameras. 😂😂😂 https://t.co/9yKkDAUh2v— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 29, 2020 More

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      in US Politics

      Former Republican congressman says Murdoch's media outlets fuelling 'climate rejectionism'

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      A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. More

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      in Elections

      Moderator Chris Wallace criticized as Biden drowned out by Trump in debate

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      US elections 2020

      Fox News host blamed for failing to control debate stage as president spends evening talking over others

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      1:41

      US presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace struggles to contain Trump – video

      The Fox News host Chris Wallace faced much criticism as he struggled to referee the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night.
      For most of the event, Trump talked over Biden and Wallace failed to keep the president patient for his chance to talk. At a few other moments, the Democratic challenger’s scowls and snickering at the president interrupted Trump’s comments.
      Many viewers blamed Wallace, though it was Trump who most often broke the agreed rules of the debate, refused to stick to his own speaking time, and steamrollered over both other men.
      “That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck,” said CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper. “That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace, and it’s primarily because of President Trump.”
      “That was the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life,” said ABC political anchor George Stephanopoulos.
      The former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill tweeted: “Chris Wallace is embarrassing, and trying to pretend that the problem isn’t 100% Trump.”

      Claire McCaskill
      (@clairecmc)
      Chris Wallace is embarrassing, and trying to pretend that the problem isn’t 100% Trump.

      September 30, 2020

      Again and again as Trump interrupted Biden, Wallace could be heard in the background saying “Mr President, Mr President”, trying to get Trump to wait his turn.
      Ben Rhodes, a political commentator and former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, tweeted: “Chris Wallace just disappearing.”

      Ben Rhodes
      (@brhodes)
      Chris Wallace just disappearing

      September 30, 2020

      Ana Navarro-Cárdenas
      (@ananavarro)
      Oh my God.Chris Wallace has totally lost control of this thing. He’s allowing Trump to behave like schoolyard bully, completely disrespecting the millions of Americans who tuned-in hoping to see a debate of ideas, and a plan to move America forward.

      September 30, 2020

      The New York magazine business journalist Josh Barro tweeted: “People are hating on Chris Wallace but I think there was no way to moderate this debate effectively.”

      Josh Barro
      (@jbarro)
      People are hating on Chris Wallace but I think there was no way to moderate this debate effectively.

      September 30, 2020

      Carl Bernstein
      (@carlbernstein)
      Chris Wallace needs to shut trump down and insist he follow rules…and , as moderator, enforce them…stop the debate for 60 secs and lay down the rules.

      September 30, 2020

      Debate moderators often get either high marks or low marks from viewers, conservative and liberal, during presidential debates. It’s rarer to see bipartisan agreement that a moderator lost control. That was the emerging opinion coming out of the first debate, as conservative commentators criticised Wallace for not challenging Biden on some of his attacks on Trump.
      Biden seemed to get frustrated with Wallace’s failing attempts to rein in Trump when it was his turn to talk.
      “It’s hard to get a word in with this clown,” Biden said.
      Wallace himself seemed aware that he didn’t have total command over the debate. After an extended speech by Trump, Biden said: “I can’t remember everything he was ranting about.”
      Wallace responded: “I’m having trouble myself.”

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      6:22

      Biden and Trump trade insults in frenzied presidential debate – video highlights

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      US elections 2020

      Donald Trump

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      Fox News

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      in World Politics

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

      Will This Be the Election to End All Elections?

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      The Mad Complicity of Trump, Pompeo and the Media

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      In an article published by Al Jazeera with the title, “What is behind the hype about the new Iran-China partnership?” Pakistan-based journalist Tom Hussain weighs in on how media in the US have become dedicated to magnifying real events not to further our understanding of them, but to create a climate of conflict, if not war in the Middle East. 

      Hussain cites two stories that US media have been running with in recent weeks to generate emotional heat while depriving them of the light of intelligible analysis. The first is the strategic partnership agreement between Iran and China. The second is the normalization of diplomatic and trade relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.

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      Hussain notes that both stories have been interpreted in the US as “escalations in the geopolitical conflict between the US and Iran.” Seeking some needed perspective, he points out that “the first development was a media creation. The New York Times (NYT) ran a front-page story citing a ‘leaked’ draft of the 25-year strategic partnership agreement under negotiation between China and Iran since 2016.” The Times story summed up its case in its misleading headline: “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Media creation:

      1) Fabricated melodrama masquerading as news provided by respectable media outlets to prove that they can be just as disrespectful of the truth as social media 
      2) The state of hyperreality induced by society’s obsessive addiction to professional media and the entertainment industry, effectively canceling the public’s relationship with reality 

      Contextual Note

      The methodology of media creation has achieved something close to perfection in the Donald Trump era. It reflects a complex team effort shared by an infinitely creative political superstructure and the complicit media.

      Before Trump, this novel dynamic that now regulates the news cycle had never existed in the political world. Trump didn’t invent “alternate facts,” even though a member of his team made the term a permanent item of US political vocabulary. Politicians have always lied and exaggerated, but it was always about specific issues. With Trump, it has now become a way of life. Without hyperreality, the news would be too boring to pay attention to. The public now expects it. For their profitability, the media now depend on it.

      Building the hyperreal system required two critical components. At its core is a democratically elected clown show whose members are skilled at turning every utterance into a deliberate distortion and often inversion of reality. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have perfected that role. For a while, they were accompanied by John Bolton, the former national security adviser. But when that began to look too much like the Three Stooges, the production team pared it back to make it look more like Abbot and Costello.

      Embed from Getty Images

      One member of the show’s technical crew, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, has compared the Trump administration’s show to Alice in Wonderland. Once the hyperreal wonderland sets were in place, the media could play their role of amplifying every absurdity in the actors’ actions and discourse and presenting it as the essential news of the day. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and many others then had an open field for manufacturing scoops designed to reveal how artificial and distorted the starring team had become.

      In the example Hussain examines, the lead player was Pompeo, a man whose commitment to hyperreality includes a personal belief in a marvelous work of American evangelical fiction that claims to be inspired by the Bible: “the rapture.” Hussain recounts that when interviewed by Fox News in early August, “Pompeo claimed that the prospective China-Iran deal would put Communist cash in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s hands.” Hussain then mentions Pompeo’s warnings: “China’s entry into Iran will destabilize the Middle East. It’ll put Israel at risk. It’ll put the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates at risk as well.”

      No patriotic American is allowed to doubt that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the good guys on the world stage. It doesn’t matter that any of these good guys may from time to time slaughter civilian populations (in Gaza or Yemen), seize land that is not theirs in violation of UN resolutions, ambush, assassinate and dismember the occasional dissident journalist or blockade an allied nation (Qatar) that doesn’t toe their line. Washington long ago elected those three nations to the good guys club. If any of the three detects or even invents a threat from elsewhere, the US will be by their side.

      In the interview with Fox News, Pompeo amplified his warning: “Iran remains the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and to have access to weapons systems and commerce and money flowing from the Chinese Communist Party only compounds that risk for that region.” It doesn’t matter how much truth or falsehood there may be in Pompeo’s claim. What matters is that the evil force he has identified combines the two permanent objects of US paranoia in a single historical event: terrorism and communism.

      Breaking free from the envelope of hyperreality his reporting has focused on, Hussain offers this extraordinary moment of sincerity so rare in today’s media: “At the risk of spotlighting my own inadequacies as a journalist, I [cannot] help wondering why editors and writers seem so willing to fan the flames of war.” 

      To answer his own question, he might have simply reviewed the past 75 years of US history to realize that the Cold War has always been a Hollywood production, courtesy of the military-industrial complex and its pervasive economic logic. But unlike Hollywood action films, US foreign policy as modeled by the media has real world consequences. Hussain makes this clear: “The long-suffering peoples of the Middle East could do without journalists once again playing cheerleader for American politicians who perpetuate their domestic power by igniting conflict in others’ backyards.”

      Russiagate is one obvious manifestation of the hyperreal campaign. It’s the one chosen by the Democrats. Pompeo and the Republicans prefer demonizing China. The New Yorker has just published an article debunking in glorious detail the entire Russiagate ideology so assiduously pursued by the most respectable media in the US, starting with The New York Times. But the principle goes beyond Russia and President Vladimir Putin. “Foreign interference is now a trope in American politics, at risk of becoming as cheap and meaningless as the term ‘fake news’ became once it was co-opted by Trump,” The New Yorker reports.

      Historical Note

      Future historians centuries from today will wonder why the US empire of the late 20th and early 21st centuries required the non-stop fabrication of an imaginary all-powerful enemy to maintain its identity as an empire. The Roman Empire did quite well for centuries without requiring a cold war ideology. Neither did the British Empire, Genghis Khan or the ancient Persian Empire. Once they had the military might to move and conquer, they focused on the supposed pragmatic rationality of their ability to control and exploit resources to occupy an ever-expanding geographical zone of influence.

      Analyzing the US empire from the perspective of Pakistan, Tom Hussain reminds those Americans who happen to read his column of this simple truth: “There is no grand alliance or ‘evil axis’ – just tentative diplomacy and proxy warfare amid shifts in the balance of power in the Middle East, necessitated in part by the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as the seepage of power to Beijing from Washington.”

      Only a small minority of Americans today are willing to accept the idea of “shifts in the balance of power,” knowing that the “greatest nation in the history of the world” has monopolistically exercised power over the globe for decades. Nor are they about to countenance the idea of “seepage of power” because that would call into question America’s divine mission to spread its enlightened but fundamentally elitist democratic-capitalist ideology across the globe.

      In the age of Trump, it appears useless to point out that enlightened leaders — and even benevolent despots — have throughout history consistently recognized and dealt with the historical reality of shifts in the balance of power. Power is never absolute and never stable, but when it does approach becoming absolute — as happens, at least in people’s minds, when hyperreality takes over — Lord Acton’s wisdom dating from 1887 ends up prevailing: it “corrupts absolutely.”

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More